


The Mechanics of Uncertainty

by maelidify



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, I'm not a physicist, Lucy POV, Or a doctor, and only there because she canonically has conflicted feelings, but I'm Doing My Best, damned if I believe Lucy would let Flynn die, gets trippy at one point, the wyatt/lucy is faint, this uh, when there's a damn time machine in front of her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 13:35:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17265143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: (When the group finishes their toast to Flynn, they hear a noise, a familiar noise, and turn, all at once, to see the machine disappear into itself.“Lucy, what are you doing?” Wyatt breathes, but he knows. They all do.)





	The Mechanics of Uncertainty

Lucy is far from a physicist, but she has heard of the block universe theory, which is the idea that all of time exists simultaneously. A tapestry most people can only experience in the linear. She wonders, then, what the fabric looks like about now— full of holes and loops and messy knots.  
  
Her friends are drinking a toast. Her eyes fall on Wyatt. The way he moves, the tilt of his head when he drinks. It should stir something in her, and maybe it does. But she feels like all of time is contained in her ribcage, and it’s all wrong.

* * *

  
(When the group finishes their toast to Flynn, they hear a noise, a familiar noise, and turn, all at once, to see the machine disappear into itself. 

  
“Lucy, what are you doing?” Wyatt breathes, but he knows. They all do.)

* * *

   
Lucy stares at the autopilot controls created by a version of Jiya who will likely never exist. There has to be a reason the time machine still exists in spite of that. Shakily, she enters the date she needs— just after Jessica’s death. Thankfully, this version of the _Lifeboat_ holds charge for a while.   
  
If the block universe theory is true, all of the tampering they’ve done shouldn’t be possible. Everything is stamped into the fabric of reality a certain way, everything is set. So obviously the theory must be incorrect.  
  
And yet. The time machine is here, a remnant from a future that hopefully won’t exist. And she’s here, a remnant from a reality where she had a sister, and also remnant from a reality where Wyatt left her for a wife he never stopped loving. Maybe that love thing is a constant too— something that never leaves, even if it never happens. Even if it happened once, but never happened too.  
  
As the machine shakes around her (and she feels cold and alone and— she's never done this before, has she? Rattled through history by herself, clutching her elbows in solitude, hissing through her teeth at the rough momentum), she wonders if time is more complicated than one thing. If, maybe, there’s a constant lingering of the things that got erased, as though maybe a pencil outline still existed.  
  
She used to trust facts. Maybe facts are just something structurally different than what she’d previously believed them to be.    
  
(When she lands, she knows she doesn’t have much time.  
  
Fortunately, she’d looked up an address a long time ago, and she still remembers it.)

 

* * *

  
Lucy first read the diary entry with Wyatt breathing over her shoulder, and then alone in that room, and then during the Gold Rush. What surprised her was how little it surprised her. Feeling safe and protected with Garcia Flynn? It shouldn’t have felt possible, but she remembered how he sat next to her when she was sinking into her own illogical feelings, handing her a beer, the solid presence of his long body next to hers on the couch. How they talked all night soon after that, and the smile that broke his face like a sunrise when she woke up. Safe and protected. Okay.   
  
She shakes her head as she rushes down the street, the California darkness cloying and lukewarm and tense. Hopefully she landed close enough…  
  
He’d told her she was always in love with someone else. And she still can’t deny her feelings for Wyatt, but they’ve turned into something else within the past few weeks. A sore. A tangle of threads. Maybe she’ll want to be with him, one day, but she can’t sort that out now. She has to be where she is, to salvage what she can.    
  
When she reaches the Flynn residence, there is a man stumbling away, clutching his head. Of course— his body would be identified if found near his past family, and more things would continue to unravel. He must be heading to the _Lifeboat_ and dammit, she needs to let him because that’s a detail of the recent past that can’t be changed. Not without catastrophe.  
  
She follows at a close distance and knows his brain must be unspooling itself and she’s also starting to feel the static, which is a faint headache worming its way through her synapses. If he weren’t in such pain, surely he’d sense that he was being trailed. Surely he’d know it was her.  
  
When the machine disappears, he stumbles to his knees. He doesn’t have much time, _they_ don’t have much time. She emerges from the shadows and grabs his arm and he looks up at her, amazed, like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. Like he’s seeing his own end and doesn’t mind.  
  
She never asked to be his angel of death.  
  
“Come on,” she says. “It’s time to go home.”

* * *

  
Back when they were in the Gold Rush… she doesn’t remember the words they exchanged, quite. She remembers the merciless heat, and how tall he was in front of her, and the way he… what? Tried to protect his own heart from her, tried to encourage her towards what he knew would make her happy? Bullshit. Garcia Flynn has always been so _sure_ of his own knowledge, of who she is and what he means to her. News flash, buddy. Her mind is her own. 

  
And here he is in 2012, dying, and it just pisses her off more.  
  
She could focus more on the tangle of memory if she didn’t have 200 plus pounds of _very tall_ man leaning against her shoulders and she should have thought this _through_ , dragged along someone stronger than her because, after all, February 11th 2012 would always exist, wouldn’t it?  
  
“Try not to die,” she says, still pissed, the words snagging on her tongue. It doesn’t help that her headache is getting worse and her own physical condition is weakening.  
  
“You… you shouldn’t have come,” Flynn says through gritted teeth.  
  
“Look, I know you wanted to die heroically and…” she stumbles and he stumbles with her, his knees catching in the dirt. She grunts and helps him stand again. They need to keep moving. “And _redeem yourself_ or whatever but it’s not that easy. Nothing’s easy.”  
  
“Truer words,” he mutters darkly. Dammit. He’s slowing down, and he smells like blood, and every few moments he spasms again and then her first spasm hits her, the first one that seems to cripple her psyche for a long pull of moments… _Keep going_ , she thinks, silently urging herself, urging him.  
  
The pain is agonizing for her by the time they reach the _Lifeboat_ ; she can’t imagine what is is for him. He leans his considerable weight against hers as they stumble inside, and maybe she imagines the faint smile on his lips when she tightens his seatbelt, but she can’t focus on that right now. She punches in the date she left behind and collapses in her own seat.  
  
Beside her, Flynn has gone limp. She realizes their hands are entangled and thinks _huh_ before closing her eyes to a flood of sweet darkness…

* * *

  
_There is something that isn’t fog, but maybe looks like the way mist settles on a great body of water. Something that is maybe moonlight or darkness or that place behind the eyelids. A woman is there and Lucy squints to see her._  
  
_A rush through her body, like being unbuilt. “_ Amy. _”_  
  
_Her sister smiles and suddenly she is close to her. “Look down,” she says softly and Lucy does, she’ll do anything Amy tells her to, she’s missed her so much…_  
  
_They are hovering over the ocean. She can’t tell which one. It is the middle of the storm and the waves batter one another mercilessly and weave into one another and she never realized the ocean was so full of colors, colors that shouldn’t even exist._  
  
_Her mind is full, suddenly,  with the impossible._  
  
_“You never existed,” Lucy says weakly. She can barely hear her own voice but she can see the set of her sister’s shoulders and the curve of her cheek and the warmth in her eyes. She leans her head into Amy’s shoulder and she’s solid and ephemeral at the same time._  
  
_“Didn’t I?” Amy says. She’s gazing at the water._  
  
_Suddenly she pulls away from Lucy and_ pushes _, and Lucy stumbles, falling into the water, a crash like Icarus into a shade of wave that shouldn’t exist but does, impossibly so…_

* * *

  
Wyatt is there when she wakes, which she does slowly and painfully. When she struggles to sit up, her body feels like lead.   
  
“Lucy,” he says, and she sees the relief flood his face. It hurts, almost, seeing him like that. Knowing how much he must have been worried. There are deep gray bags under his eyes, like he hasn’t been sleeping, and there’s further proof in the way he holds himself. The tension in his shoulders, weary and downcast.  
  
Light in his eyes, though. Well. She’s happy to see him, too, in spite of all of her uncertainty.  
  
“Flynn,” she says. “Did he…”  
  
His face darkens a little, and she can think of a thousand reasons why. “He made it out worse than you did. He’s alive but… well, an aneurysm is a hell of a thing.”  
  
“Is he awake?”   
  
“No.” Wyatt shifts uncomfortably in his seat, which he’d pulled close to her bed. “It… could go either way at this point.”  
  
She processes this. Her head feels hulled, like it had been scraped through with a fine comb. Finally, she says, “And the John Doe?”   
  
“What John Doe?” he says and she should have figured, but it still makes her feel a little lighter knowing that they never found an article detailing Flynn’s autopsy in 2012.  
  
“Good,” she says, “nevermind.” She feels her head; around the back, near her neck, there’s a bandage. Touching it, she suddenly remembers her dream.  
  
“Hey,” she says, “can I talk to Jiya?”  
 

* * *

   
The hospital they’re at is being protected by Homeland Security, but the recovery process still needs to be hurried along. Rittenhouse is small and broken, but still out there.   
  
Lucy walks slowly to the cafeteria, leaning on a walker, having obtained permission to try the whole walking thing sooner than she probably should. Jiya is silent beside her.  
  
She sits at a table and the other woman grabs them some food before plopping down across from her. Lucy doesn’t quite know where to start, only that Jiya might be the only person who would understand. (And possibly Flynn. Her heart twists in her chest and she tries tries tries to ignore it—)  
  
“Have you seen it too?” Lucy asks, finally.  
  
Jiya frowns. “Seen what?”   
  
“What time… _is_ ,” she manages, not sure how else to phrase it.  
  
Jiya’s expression clears, a solemnity emerging from her features. It’s easy to forget that this version of Jiya is three years older than the woman she seemingly recently befriended, but there she is. The woman who spent three years in Chinatown in the 1800s.  
  
“Ah,” Jiya says. “That.”  
  
“It all exists,” she says. “Even when it doesn’t.”  
  
Jiya smiles faintly. “Did you see the colors?”   
  
“They were beautiful,” Lucy breathes. “This is one of them. This place we are. I… I fell back into it.”  
  
They sit in silence. Lucy stirs some hospital macaroni and cheese around on a square on her tray, thinking about the timeline where Jessica existed, thinking of the timeline where she (apparently) couldn’t love Flynn because her heart belonged elsewhere. Thinking of Amy. Finally, she continues.  
  
“There’s never any certainty, is there?” she says.  
  
Jiya laughs and Lucy laughs too, even though it isn’t funny, none of this is funny. The laugh swells in her chest, spilling out violently.  
  
“Nope,” her friend says, trying to catch her breath. “None.”

* * *

   
It should be impossible for a man who stands at six feet and four inches to look small. It’s something about hospital beds, Lucy reasons. They shrink you. They remind you that you’re just a bunch of animated organic matter tied together by a soul, whatever that elusive thing is. 

  
Wyatt helps helps her into the room and she leans on the walker, not sure she wants his help. She wants his help. She doesn’t want it. _Want_ is one of those uncertain things right now.  
  
“Leave us alone?” she says. She doesn’t want to hurt Wyatt, but she doesn’t want him to be here, in this room, with her and the man who killed his wife, with the man he’s grateful to for taking that burden from him.    
  
He nods, respectful as always in spite of the conflict on his face, and steps out of the room.  
  
Slowly, she inches closer. Movement is still kind of hard. Flynn is breathing on his own, which is a good sign (he’d apparently been on a respirator for a while), and he has a bandage covering a similar location as hers, the lower back of the head. His chest rises and falls under the thin hospital gown. His eyes are closed.  
  
Idly, she wonders how Agent Christopher had managed to get him, a wanted and recently escaped criminal, into a hospital without incident. Maybe she’d assigned him a different name, a different identity.  
  
Less idly, she wonders where he is right now. Where his damaged mind had ghosted itself to. She pulls a seat over to his bed and lowers herself into it. She doesn’t touch him, because he looks so fragile, but she leans her forehead against his bed’s railing, letting her own eyes close.  
  
There’s a slim but present sense of comfort to this, feeling him so close, even if he isn’t truly there.  
  
“Come on, you bastard,” she mutters. “Come back. I don’t want to do this without you.”    
  
A few moments later his breathing, which has been even and raspy, suddenly disrupts itself. Fearfully, she looks up.  
  
He looks back at her.

* * *

Lucy knows she is recovering quickly compared to Flynn. He had, after all, been in his own timeline for a more extended period than she had.   
  
It takes a day before he can talk, and his first words to her are a growl: “That was stupid.”  
  
“You’re welcome.” She studies him from her chair; he is awake, sitting up, and some of the vitality has returned to his body. He occupies his own space again and she bites back a smile.  
  
“And stubborn,” he adds.  
  
“Noted.”  
  
“Why?” he says, and his expression is broken. Without thinking about it, she reaches out and touches his face. His skin is rough and he leans into the touch, still frowning.  
  
A thousand uncertainties, and a thousand things that still need to be done. Rittenhouse needs to be defeated, her feelings for Wyatt need to be sorted, her future self needs to deliver a journal. Amy needs to be saved, even though she knows now that she still exists in that ocean of time somewhere, that everything is real. She doesn’t know what anything means, or how all this will pan out.  
  
“I never reached the good part,” she says, instead of any of that or maybe because of it. “I’d like to.”  
  
He considers this. “It might not be worth it. For you,” he adds.    
  
Lucy thinks back on the ocean of time, the entirety of it, layered and angry and strange before her. And she thinks of what this man had been willing to do for her and her friends and the odd, tentative idea of happiness. There’s a timeline out there where she loves him, and one where she loves Wyatt, and countless others full of change and flux. She doesn’t have to know which one this is.  
  
“Who knows?” she says, and finds that she is smiling. Her hand is on his cheek still, his hand tracing hers softly.

He lets out a half-startled laugh before he smiles back. _This is it_ , she thinks. _This is where I am_.    


End file.
